“Unknown. We’re still pulling names. But whatever Elias was doing, it wasn’t a suicide mission. It was documentation.”
“Keep digging,” I say. “I want to know every voice on those tapes.”
“Copy.”
Ending the call, I set the phone down and look at the blueprints again.
A leverage file.
If Elias was compiling names, money trails, and recordings... then he wasn’t there to destroy the building. He was there to gather evidence.
So what are the Red Xs?
Red X.
Tracing the mark with my finger, I see three of them—thick, angry marker strokes over specific points in the VIP Study.
The Judge told me they were structural weak points. He told me Elias was an engineer turned radical.
I look at the schematic. One X is over the main air intake valve on the north wall. One X is over a support column near the portrait gallery. One X is over the center table.
In the museum, I saw explosives and reacted. But looking at these targets now, the math is wrong. You don't bury a room by hitting an air intake. You hit the load-bearing trusses. The floor joists.
Targeting the air intake suggests chemical dispersal. Gas. The kind of silent, invisible weapon that chokes a room in seconds and leaves the architecture untouched. But Elias didn’t have a gas mask. He didn’t have a rebreather. He wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit under his windbreaker. He didn’t even have a canister.
He had a block of electronics wrapped in tape. A crude, ugly brick of wire and a blinking LED.
My head throbs. The lack of sleep is catching up to me.
I hear footsteps. Soft. Barefoot. I don’t look up, but my body reacts before my brain does—a tightening in my chest, a spike in my pulse.
Iris walks into the room. She stops in the doorway.
She’s wearing one of my black shirts. It’s huge on her, hanging off one shoulder, the hem brushing her mid-thighs. Her legs are bare, pale, bruised from the rough handling of last night. Strands escapes her messy bun to frame her face.
Dark purple circles weight down her eyes. Her lips still swollen. Beautifully broken.
We stare at each other across the length of the table. The silence is thick, awkward, and heavy with the memory of sweat and friction and the words we shared in the dark.
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Is the coffee fresh?”
“Yes.”
She walks to the sideboard, moving stiffly. I watch her pour a cup. Her hands are steady today; the tremors from the shock have faded, replaced by a dull, resigned calm. Taking a sip, she closes her eyes for a second, then turns to face me, leaning against the counter and holding the mug with both hands.
“Are we going to talk about it?” she asks.
“About the attack?”
“About us.”
I look down at the blueprints. “There is no ‘us’. There is a situation. And we survived it.”
“Is that what you call it?” She walks toward the table. “Survival?”
“Adrenaline scrambles people,” I say, repeating the lie I told her last night. “It confuses the system. It was a biological error.”
“Stop lying,” she says softly.
